myProbe

10/22/2013

Well here's a quick update for you, I made a great find for my Probe recently and went today to get it...

For only 450€ and transport costs I brought her home. Burnt clutch and a little wear and tear is all. Not registered to Finland. Unfortunately I can't save them all, so this will be my parts car.

It has most of the stuff I need right now and pays back the price this winter already. It's got the catalysator and the heat shields for turbo and headers which I'm hoping to polish and paint. Also the inside plastics are in good condition so I'll be able to kill those basty vibrations in my cabin. And more!

Well updates soon when I have time to look better at her. Here's a pic though!

10/20/2013

By the way, the batteries in the previous blog post were all shot, I got them up to 12.5V but they would quickly discharge to 11V, I tried everything.

Well, winter's knocking on the door and I'm slowly beginning work on Probe. Since I haven't got any money to spend for a month or two I'll start with the "free" stuff. I'm trying to fix all flaws I found while driving the car during summer, which would be;

- The exhaust back end was sitting too low, it was almost resting on the crossmember in rear
- The catalysator seems to be clogged, and needs to changed. Choices are cat delete pipe or racing catalysator
- The rear bumper lip is melting from the exhaust fumes
- The exhaust header doesn't have a heatshield and I believe it's partially the reason why the engine bay is super lava hot (can't even touch the hood when the engine is fully warmed up)

Here we are washing the underbody, I do it every year before I bring it in. Thats why it looks so good after all these years, I think. ;)

Looking good. Here you can see the old exhaust hanger on top of the rear crossmember.

Here's the new one I fabricated, so thats one thing off the list. Works great, now there's just the right amount of space all around for the pipe to come over.

Here I'm repairing the bumper problem. I'm thinking of building an aluminium heat shield there so that this would never happen again. You can't really see it in this picture, but the exhaust tip is too far inside the bumper which is partially causing the problem. However, since the tip is fixed as you can see there's not much I can do about it.

So if you are going to build your own exhaust, I highly recommend to buy the type of exhaust back box where you can put some pipe and choose the tip yourself

In other news, I'm going to be employed in about a month so later this year should be more interesting. Also the rear seats are almost done, just some final adjustments.

Also, I made a great find today which means a lot for my Probe. This company moves stuff from US to Finland for very cheap prices; http://www.finn-us.com/ . You set up your own US post address where you can order to from most USA online stores. The prices are so cheap because the stuff sails on a ship so the delivery takes a long time, but I don't mind. This means I can order big items like bumpers and rare items from all the shops out there (most of them don't ship to Finland) easy and relatively cheap, will totally test this out later on! Also I google'd about and saw only positive comments from this company so it should be all good.

9/03/2013

Felt like updating you with the latest news, although nothing groundbreaking. The Probe is still waiting outside for me to take time and make room in the garage and wash the car thorougly over and under.. Should have more time and energy soon when my work experience period ends!

So here we go, the back seats are coming together, here's the bottom part done! Round of applause for my lovely girl for all the hard work :) Looks awesome huh?!

Also, I got quite lucky last weekend, my friend had replaced all six of his batteries in his project because 3 of them had overheated and boiled, probably when charging. I recycled two of them to myself as they still had low voltage and no signs of damage. Not just any batteries, mind you;

Optima Yellow Tops baby! 55 AH and _AGM_. Definately worth a try to resurrect them. This would be a huge save if I got either of them to work, I could install it into the trunk as I've planned and do the new cold air intake this year. Probably can't afford new AGM batteries this winter, so I'm really hoping I can at least get them to barely work. I'll be charging them with my new CTEK charger which supposedly has ways to resurrect beat up batteries, so I'll let you know how it works out.

8/22/2013

Right'o, summers just about packed, I'm getting ready to push my Probe into the garage once more. Mostly cos' something's a lil off lately, the car doesn't feel that powerful anymore and there is way too much heat in the engine bay, I'm suspecting blocked catalysator and I really need to find or fabricate some heatshields for the turbo and the header.

Before I ride my car next year, I have a ton of stuff to do, so I already can't tell if I'm able to drive it next summer or not. The wheels and tires are bent and worn, the suspension is way too old to function, the interior is halfway done and I really want to finish it this year. Also the few rusts spots are getting critical, which means painting, and I'm planning to paint 1/3 of the car at once. And maybe a engine head overhaul.

SO mostly I need money, luckily I'm finishing school soon and they tell me I have a place at the company I'm a trainee at right now so let's hope that'll work out.

But it was a pretty good summer, I had some moments. I learnt to drive the Probe a lot, on the other hand I learnt to not drive it so hard all the time so I wasn't freaking out for my driving license all summer.

Here's Probe in fresh wax, 2 layers of Autoglym.

I had a tune-up going here, I flushed the cooling system with cleaner agent and topped up with premium stuff. Redline Water Wetter, that shit really works yo. Also power steering flush.

This just came in the post today, thats 4 meters of red and black vehicle leatherette. Super dope, can't wait till my gf gets busy with it. It's coming to the rear seats, and also here and there some bits. Luckily the red color is pretty much the same as in the upcoming floor mat. SHOULD BE GOOD!

6/07/2013

So it happened that I decided to put the Probe back together for some summer driving. I took it for inspection, but it failed due to ABS problems... You reap as you sow, they say.

Well today I found some time to really start looking for the problem., which was that the ABS would kick in at slow speeds while pressing the brake lightly.

I was afraid the sensors I bought just weren't suitable as they were Mazda 626 GD parts, and there's a fair chance they could been different. I was also thinking if the rubber hoses for the brakes in the front played a part, so I went ahead and bought steel braided for the front as well. Got them almost as cheap as rubber parts from Mamasan. From that experience I can totally recommend to try out this shop, they have online sales and a small shop in Kehä III/Espoo.

The kit had new bolts and gaskets as well, brand is HEL Performance, 21€ / hose.

Here I'm halfway through installing them;

Pics refuse to rotate, tilt your head to left. :D

So, while checking out ABS sensors on every wheel I found out that one them had a gap of 1,3mm which was too much according to the manual, so I reinstalled that. And what do you know, I believe that was the cause for they really seemed to work properly now!

Also, my wheel hub adapter popped in the post box so finally I was able to install this steering wheel I bought 3 years ago! I also put some carbon tape on the horn button as the one that came with it was pretty stupid. Or maybe I've just gone a bit crazy for that tape. ;)

So much better to look & drive! :)

I also finished the trunk carpet job, bnt I don't have a picture of that.

So I'll be taking her to the reinspection on Monday, thumbs up the ABS works proper this time, so that the summer may begin! B)

5/04/2013

Whew. another post so soon, I had another day at the garage again and wanted to present my fruit of work.

I begun to make shields for the amps in the trunk. The trunk is going to be: subwoofer in the back middle, put some aluminium sheet in the back seat, into which I'll bolt my amps and gear. On top of them, to both sides of the subwoofer, I will make a "window" from wood & acryl & aluminium frame I have laying around, to protect the amps and wiring from any untied cargo I might be driving with.

So here's most of the materials already cut, I will frame
the plastic with aluminium rail I have in the pic, and THAT frame will
be attached to a wooden frame. Note, the green color in the plastic is just the protective film, its crystal clear underneath. :)

Aand here they are , waiting for decoration. I decided to go with carbon fibre tape I found in Biltema. It was 17€ for something like 170cm X 60cm, so it's pretty cheap, easy to work with and looks&feels very nice. The 3M brand is still better though, it just costs like 4 times smore, so not my cup of tea. I wouldn't use this tape on the exterior surfaces though.

I like. Now I need some corner brackets so I can screw & glue the pieces together and work the attachment points.

Again some product placement, I used this spray glue from Motonet (16e / can) to glue the deafening material to the plywood. Works like a charm, recommend. Also recommend not buying the cheapo glue as I heard even some of the best (most expensive) of spray glue/s aren't really that good. This one did the job for me, so no regrets.

Yep. Now I'm totally broke for the month again, so I might not be able to go on until I make more money. Also we're visiting NYC next week, so chances are there's not much to tell for a while.

Turns out the inspection date of the car is due tomorrow, so I'm not sure if I should drive it this year or not. Probably I will end up putting it together soon and inspecting it, driving until my summer vacation and then start working on it early, but not sure at this point. Since the car is essentially the same it was last year it's not a must-thing this summer.

UPDATE:

I managed to buy some more time at the garage and made some progress with these, just wanted to post the pics;

Here's the frames together, I still need to drill big holes in the corners for attachments, thumbs up I don't fuck up at this point :D

I begun to cover the trunk bits with the fabric I previously showed you, here's a pic of the progress. I also used spray glue. The color is spot on in my opinion.

Just managed to get the other piece done before I had to rush off, looks nice eh? First time doing anything like this, so I'm happy with it. Only mistake is that some of the screw ends are visible through the fabric on top side, but can't be bothered.

Alrightey, now I won't be back for a few weeks, got places to go. :) Take care!

4/27/2013

Well I had a day for the Probe and made some progress, I begun doing the trunk stuff at this point.

I'm making a new floor from plywood to the trunk, to support the weight. The stock is basicly a cardboard piece that covers one third of the trunk area, so that was useless.

I'm doing it in two pieces, so it'll fit in and also I'm putting hinges so I can lift up the front piece to access the spare wheel well. I don't know if you can actually lift off the wheel through there, but I'm not going to

Here I'm cutting out the template from cardboard;

The back seat is covered with the old deafening mat, I'm reusing that between the body and plywood.

And this is the end product of the days work, fits perfect (after making adjustments over and over)

This is how the front section flips up after I get the hinges, you can also see the frames I put for strengthening the structure.

Also, I finished early so I put the dash stuff back together. Goddamn weak plastic, it is very likely the last time it can be removed/installed, over half of the screw connections are broken and gone, so it's all put together with glue and about five screws. I wish we had more Probes in this country, so I could get myself new bits from a scrap yard, but unfortunately there's no such thing.

Nice to have the LEDs in the buttons working again, we'll see how long they last this time! Also, the clocks new as you may remember. :)

So that's that, I just bought more stuff to continue the work in the trunk, I'm expecting to go there next Wednesday. After I'm done with the trunk, I might drive the Probe a bit, since after that I need to remove all the panels and carpets, meaning no more driivng a few months, in which time the summer will be over.
Just started her up again, runs like a champ still :)

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myProbe

Welcome to my blog. I am Miikka aka Jouzer from Finland and am holding this blog mainly for my own amusement, but since you're here take a look.

I've chosen this Ford Probe to be my project/hobby car, and when its on the wheels it'll work as a summer car as well. It wasn't supposed to be in this bad condition, but now that I've started I ain't gonna stop. So keep tuned if you lookin' for some amateur renovation. :)